The proliferation of social and professional networks makes some job boards and headhunters feel pretty old-fashioned. Professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo already play a big role in talent acquisition, while companies like BranchOut, Jobvite and even Monster are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. According to some estimates, recruiting firms consume a third of hiring budgets but produce fewer than 10 percent of the results, due to fees that range above 20 percent of salaries.

Startups and growing companies seeking executives and managers as well as established businesses looking to fill new professional positions need to understand how to use these various recruiting tools, platforms and services effectively.

In this webinar, we will look at the following topics:

• What are the different means of talent acquisition today?
• When does it make sense to use social media versus more-traditional strategies?
• How can you hire top talent cost-effectively?

Our panel of experts includes:

• David Card, Research Director, GigaOM Pro
• Sarah White, GigaOM Pro analyst and proprietor, HRTechBlog.com
• Mike Dover, GigaOM Pro analyst and Managing Partner, Socialstruct Advisory Group
• Tom Anderson, Manager, Talent Acquisition, TriNet

Join GigaOM Pro and our sponsor TriNet for a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012, at 10 a.m. PST. When you register today, you will be automatically entered to win a new iPad 2, courtesy of TriNet.

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GigaOM

One of the most obvious trends from the big smart grid conference DistribuTECH last week was how much analytics and big data tools will be used to try to remake energy in 2012, from curbing energy consumption, to reducing energy loss, to adding in more clean power to the grid. Here’s 10 ways that analytics and big data will start to shape the production and consumption of energy in the world:

1). Weather data: Having a finger on the pulse of constantly changing weather data on a micro and macro level can help utilities, building owners and consumers optimize their energy consumption habits and promote energy efficiency. Startup EnergyHub recently partnered with sensor network player Earth Networks to use weather data to make a more efficient form of demand response (utilities controlling power consumption). Other startups like EcoFactor, Opower and Tendril also use weather data as part of their energy behavioral analytics.

IBM has long sold a weather prediction service called Deep Thunder to municipalities, organizations and utilities, which use it to do things like tailor their services, change routes, or generate more or less power. I think weather data could some day provide a platform for some very important next generation services and applications for energy efficiency, much in the way that location data is used as a platform for a variety of services.

2). Cell phone data: Cell phones in our pockets are essentially palm-sized sensors and computers sending a constant stream of information to the cloud where companies could one day use that data to create energy efficiency and better energy products. And yes, a lot of that data is private information, but after that data is anonymized it can be used for the greater good of the community — particularly via the billions of cell phones in developing countries. A startup called Jana does research projects around cell phone data in developing countries, and looks to work with NGOs on programs to create better infrastructure, energy infrastructure and resources.

3). Connected thermostat data: One of the biggest trends from DistribuTECH this year was the overwhelming amount of smart thermostats that are now being sold and marketed. Companies can incorporate that thermostat data into data bases that can be used to promote energy efficiency. EcoFactor’s service remembers every time a home owner overrides the automated smart thermostat system and changes the personalized service to accommodate that manual override. Using 100,000 connected thermostats (which produce 5 billion data points each month) EnergyHub found some interesting statistics like folks in cold climates have a lower average heating temperature set point than households in warmer states.

4). Hadoop & energy databases: The open source data base tool Hadoop is well known — and oft used — in the computing worlds. But in the energy and utility worlds it’s quite rare. However, as the amount of energy data has started to rapidly grow from the smart grid, some companies are embracing Hadoop as a key way to manage energy info. Opower tells me it’s using Hadoop (and the company commercializing Hadoop, Cloudera) as an important way to manage its massive energy data streams. Likewise PJM has turned to Hadoop as a way to organize the energy data coming off of a synchophaser sensor project.

5). Clean power data: One of the main goals for the smart grid is to enable the addition of more variable clean power, which is far more unreliable than fossil fuels (the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow 24/7). Analytics crunching the data from a utilities’ energy supply and demand can help make clean power a little less variable, by being able to more accurately predict the environmental conditions, as well as more accurately assess demand from energy users.

6). Electric car data: Electric cars will by their nature be connected cars, using information technology to manage the vehicle charge and location. Utilities will be closely tracking the charging habits of electric car owners in order to make sure that the grid isn’t overloaded in some early adopter neighborhoods.

7). Power line sensors: One of the areas of low hanging fruit for the power grid is the simple task of helping utilities find blackouts more easily and be able to monitor and manage grid outages. That’s partly where sensor systems called synchophasers come in, which can in real time monitor the health of power lines, collecting multiple data streams per second. Expect all major networks to have synchophaser systems installed over the coming years.

8). Real estate data: Startups like First Fuel Software can use big data to make super accurate assessments about buildings and ways to reduce the energy consumption of buildings — without any extra hardware or monitoring software being installed at the building. Things like weather around the building, demographics of the people in the building, and the building’s historical energy consumption can be used to create an accurate projection. The best way to make a building more energy efficient is by getting as much data about the building;s energy use as possible.

9). Variable pricing: Some day when electricity is sold throughout the world at different prices dependent on supply and demand, massive data bases will be needed. This type of variable pricing is offered in some places in the world, but if it ever becomes ubiquitous it will help curb consumption, by offering high prices when energy is being over used.

10). Using behavioral analytics to curb energy consumption: Getting into the brains of energy users is the job of startups like Opower and Tendril (after it acquired Gr0unded Power.) Essentially these companies have collected data on consumers and demographics and they are using it to try to guess the best way to influence the consumer to do things like upgrade their home appliances and lights to more efficient ones.

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Dave McClure has very quickly become a major force in Silicon Valley, by making investments in more than 250 companies since launching his 500 Startups fund. In Mountain View, Calif. Wednesday, 32 companies from the third class of the 500 Startups Accelerator program showed off what they’ve been working on to investors and press. And I sat through all the demos so you didn’t have to.

Based on what I saw, here are my favorite startups from the demos, in no particular order:

Fitocracy

Out of all the personal fitness apps out there, Fitocracy could be the one that makes the most impact in actually getting its users in shape. The application, which so far gas only been available in a private beta, already has 230,000 registered users. And those users are pretty engaged, with about 79 percent checking in every day and spending an average of 9 minutes per session with Fitocracy. It’s done that by adding gamification to the fitness process — getting users to level up, complete quests and unlock achievements as part of what founder Brian Wang calls a real-life RPG. But the amazing part about those stats are that they’re from Fitocracy’s web-based app; an iPhone app is in the works but has yet to be released. One it is, I expect a lot more users to catch on and start using Fitocracy to track and improve their fitness.

Contactually

“CRMs are an billion industry,” Contactually’s founder told the crowd at 500 Startups’ demo day. “But all CRMs suck.” You have to fill in information in forms and once they’re there, the information is difficult to extract and doesn’t actually help users manage their relationships. Contactually has a better way: it uses email — which is the common touch point for more or less all contact between human beings nowadays — and automatically helps determine which contacts are most important to manage. More importantly, it actually prompts users to do something with that info, urging them to follow up to important emails and contacts. But just because it gives a better way to manage contacts doesn’t mean it’s going to completely replace your CRM — it’ll also integrate with that CRM.

PayByGroup

Have you ever tried to book a trip with your friends, only to have a few of them lame out at the last minute, sticking you with the tab? Then PayByGroup is for you. The idea is to add a button to sites like Airbnb, Stubhub and the like that allows users to click a button to reserve an expensive hotel suite, a group of concert tickets, or a beach house and then invite other friends in a group to pay for their own share of that trip, vacation or event.

Switchcam

I’ve actually written about Switchcam before, back in a previous life when it was called Veokami. The startup is still focused on aggregating multiple user-submitted videos from the same event on public sites like YouTube and Vimeo and reconstruct that event with a timeline that allows users to switch from multiple angles. With a design refresh and a new brand, Switchcam has made a huge step forward. The startup hopes to make money by providing a white-label platform for performers and agents to provide user-created events on their own sites. Until now, Switchcam events have mostly been centered around music and concerts, but it sees an opportunity for sports and news, and even personal events like weddings and graduations.

Hapyrus

Hapyrus is looking to cash in on the big data craze by making it easier for enterprises to process and analyze that data more efficiently. According to co-founder Kentaro Suzuki, much of the inefficiency comes between engineers and data analysts who are tasked with making sense of big data. Because analysts are beholden to engineers to structure that data, engineers end up doing a disproportionate amount of the work. Hapyrus seeks to simplify things by enabling engineers to configure the software, freeing up analysts to run analysis whenever they want and quickly change parameters and needed.

And some honorable mentions:

Love With Food – I have a soft spot for subscription services like Birchbox, and Love with Food is a subscription service that delivers curated food samples to users and then allows them to purchase full-sized samples from its site. There’s a side benefit in that for each box delivered, the startup also donates a meal to No Kid Hungry.

MoPix – Honestly I might just like it because Mopix told attendees to use the hashtag #DVDisDead. But the startup is helping to enable independent studios and video publishers to reach audiences through digital distribution on new devices like the iPad. And that’s a really cool thing.

Brandboards – Brandboards is trying to make it easier for sports teams and stadium owners to simplify advertising across all the screens that are available throughout sports arenas. Teams like the Dallas Cowboys have thousands of displays throughout their stadiums and a captive audience, but inefficiencies in the sales process means about 30 percent of that inventory goes unsold. This startup is looking to change that.

Tiny Review – Like the bastard love child of Yelp and Instagram and Twitter, Tiny Review encourages users to mix photos along with three lines of text. And like Twitter, the inherent limitations cause users to be more creative with those reviews. As a consumer-facing startup, it’s a little bit of an outlier compared to the rest of the companies introduced, but that could be what makes it interesting.

72lux – 72lux aims to improve online advertising on sites by enabling e-commerce in publisher webpages. Instead of offering advertising alongside photo spreads that sends readers to outside sites, its technology allows publishers to make content shoppable right there. The startup is already pretty successful, with million in its sales pipeline, and it’s working with top brands and fashion mags.

There were plenty of other cool startups introduced today, and these are merely a sampling of those I think are interesting.

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DrMelon's interface works for the web and a phone.

Dr. Sang Hoon Woo is an internist at Stanford Medical School who had grown frustrated listening to his patients’ tales of trying to find health information online and reading about Steve Jobs’ misguided attempts to cure his cancer using homeopathic means found on the web. Dr. Woo decided he had to do something to help his profession reach consumers in the online (and mobile) age. So like the folks who created WebMD or Dr. Koop or myriad other online medical resources, Dr. Woo built DrMelon, with the aim of getting trusted medical information to consumers in an easily digestible form they can access from any device. He’s one of several entrepreneurs trying to bring medicine into the current connected age.

DrMelon (he was eating melon at the time he conceived the site, plus the domain name was available) was created last year, and Dr. Woo is currently raising money to take the site to a real beta within the next few months. He says he wants to be the Apple of healthcare for consumers, but what he’s doing is more akin to becoming a destination site of curated information for medical apps and information, which might make it closer to the iTunes or App Store of medical information.

The site currently offers a curated search, videos, forums and a place for patients to ask questions. Eventually, it will also contain apps recommended by doctors. Because he’s hoping patients bring DrMelon into their doctors’ offices, the web site has the same navigation and features as the mobile app. But Dr. Woo isn’t alone in thinking he has the cure for inaccessible medical information.

Dr. Woo’s startup has similarities to Happtique, a startup spun out of the Greater New York Hospital Association Ventures, that’s currently testing an app store designed for physicians as well as trying to develop a seal of approval for medical apps. In both cases, doctors are seeking ways to help consumers filter the morass of health information on the web, and eventually help build tools that can make finding trusted answers to basic questions (such as drug interactions or the efficacy of certain therapies) easier. This is both a response to spammy search results that invariably pop up when someone drops a medical condition into Google, but also an attempt to help consumers find actionable information on a single question, as opposed to a glut of questionable information on a topic.

For example, I broke my pinky toe again this weekend because I find walking to be a challenge. The DrMelon-curated search is on the right, while the Google search for the same term (broken pinky toe) is on the left. The top result for both comes from the same site, but then results diverge considerably, with Google delivering links to spam and Yahoo Answers, which can deliver less-than-trustworthy advice. This is helpful, but DrMelon, and other curated sites become super valuable if they can help create a searchable Quora-like network of expertise around medicine, where people can ask the community questions and get quality responses. Of course there’s a world of difference between asking someone to name their favorite cloud computing startups online and asking someone if that weird lump you feel in your armpit might be cancer.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear if there’s a business model around providing trusted information from doctors to consumers outside the physician’s office. Happtique wants developers to pay to have their apps reviewed by physicians in order to get its stamp of approval, while Dr. Woo is a bit more wait-and-see about revenue for now (he does run ads on the Google-generated search results he curates). Given this and a rash of other medical startups, plus the creation of the health-focused incubator Rock Health, many people see an opportunity to bring the web into the connected age, but the route to success isn’t certain.

For now, the innovation is happening around the edges, as consumers play around with data-gathering devices and share personal health challenges with friends. Employers are also involved, by buying health plans that try to entice people into social programs that promote good lifestyle decisions using gamification and other social carrots. As Dr. Woo and the hospitals working with rival Happtique are discovering, there’s a large gray area around apps, the web and business models that still needs to be defined.

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If you thought 2011 seemed like a big year for web startup funding, you were absolutely right. According to the latest MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), 2011 saw the highest level of VC investment in Internet companies over the past decade.

.9 billion went into 997 VC deals in Internet-specific over the course of 2011, an increase of 68 percent in dollars and 24 percent in deals from the previous year, when .1 billion went into 807 deals. Internet companies accounted for 24 percent of all VC investments in 2011, compared to 18 percent in 2010, the MoneyTree report said.

From the Q4 2011 MoneyTree report (click to enlarge)

But the year didn’t close on the strongest note for Internet VC investments. In the fourth quarter of 2011, .29 billion went into Internet companies, a 23 percent decline in dollars from the previous quarter and about even with the fourth quarter of 2010, when .25 billion was invested. Web VC investment in 2011 was really carried by its exceptionally strong second quarter, when .4 billion was invested in Internet companies.

Another interesting data point from the survey is the large amount of seed and early stage investments seen in 2011 across all industries that received VC funding. Seed and early stage funding as a whole was the higher in 2011 than it has been in at least seven years, according to the MoneyTree report, accounting for 1810 of the 3673 total deals completed in the year — nearly 50 percent of total deal activity.

From the Q4 2011 MoneyTree report (click to enlarge)

The current level of activity may seem a bit frothy, but with the huge numbers of people using the Internet today, may people think this is just the beginning for the industry’s growth. And either way: With 2012 on deck to be a strong year for web startup exits, particularly through initial public offerings, the Internet VC funding frenzy will probably not slow down significantly any time soon.

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GigaOM

Fewer venture firms raised more money during 2011, and sees the industry heading toward a concentration of the money is being concentrated in the hands of fewer firms, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The venture capital industry group reports that Funds that have been successful are continuing to rake in dollars from limited partners, with 38 U.S. venture capital funds received raising .6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011 with but only nine of those funds being for were new funds, according to the data released Monday from the NVCA shows.

For the entire 2011 year, 169 venture firms raised .17 billion from limited partners such as University endowments and Pension Funds. In 2010 the same number of firms raised only 13.78 billion– or 30 percent less. While more money would mean good news, but that isn’t the case.  The number of startups looking for money has gone up sharply. An active angel community and early stage investors that can put money in early stage deals, means entrepreneurs has helped many startups set-up shop. They are likely to face their biggest fundraising challenge at the Series B round, a problem that has been mounting.

From the release:

“This past year we saw more venture capital money raised by essentially the same number of firms, a sign that consolidation within the industry is continuing,” said Mark Heesen, president of NVCA. “We also continued to invest more money in companies than we raised from our investors. Both of these trends – if they continue — suggest that the level and breadth of venture investment is starting to recalibrate to reflect a concentration of capital in the hands of fewer investors. Our cottage industry is indeed getting smaller still and that will impact the startup ecosystem over time.”

For startups, which can find a few hundred thousand in seed funding or a Series A round, by hitting up angel investors or the smaller boutique firms that try to play at the seed and angel level, the impact is likely to be felt as the startup hits the point where it must move from the initial product and users to the massive scale that delivers the type of growth venture firms need. That growth will need more money, and that money is likely part of the Series B round.

Anand Sanwal, the CEO and Co-Founder of VC data provider CB Insights says what’s happening isn’t that Series B financings aren’t necessarily on the decline, there are just more startups firms competing for that money. The money, as Om predicted, has started to go to companies that having wind beneath their wings.

If one looks at venture capital as a funnel the top has gotten fatter, and the Series B point is where it narrows substantially, leaving a lot of orphaned companies. “Seed investments are kind of call option for these big funds so they can re-up at the series A or B if they want,” Sanwal said. “It’s low risk and a low investment amount.”
He stressed that this is for tech, as opposed to the life sciences or green tech industries, which require more capital to start up in general.

He also said that with the smaller funds which could be angels or micro funds of just a hundred million, there’s much less pressure on investors for a big exit, so building up a business to a Series A point and selling it would still make early investors happy. At the high end where the NVCA is tracking funds, such as the .05 billion fund Khosla Ventures raised during the fourth quarter, startups need to go big to make an impact on the overall portfolio.

So maybe a Series B raise is when an entrepreneurs needs to evaluate if he or she is in this for the big win rather than the quick flip. And it’s likely that in 2012 we’ll see a lot more entrepreneurs having to make this decision. Do they have the will and enough forward momentum to go big, or is it time to take the money and run? Or maybe just cut their losses and run?

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